The “outside” article this time around is Libraries and Google/Google Book Search: No Competition!” by yours truly–written several months ago, appearing now. There’s an interesting bit of Googler feedback relating to some questions/criticisms I raise along the way. (Note: This was written long before we had examples of the somewhat-less-than-archival quality of some of the book scans.)

If this isn’t the last time “Walt Crawford, senior analyst at RLG” appears on a new publication (or its equivalent), it will be because of publishing lags. But, of course, “Walt Crawford, OCLC” and variations on that theme will start appearing…oh, probably a couple of weeks after ALA.

Very interesting piece, Walt, and bang-on on all points. I’m interested to see the comment that Google wants to add “find in a library” links to all the books, whether part of the publisher program or the library program. I had assked the same question when the library program was still new, and got a very vague answer, which left me assuming leaving it off was a perk for publishers who were willing to play. Publishers are far happier with the idea of selling a book, via whatever means, than they are about leading people to libraries, which many seem to see as a peculiarly acceptable form of organized piracy; in fact, they were far quicker to embrace Amazon’s Search Inside program than Google Print because Amazon is a bookseller.

Kevin Kelly’s giddy piece in the Times magazine seemed to think scanning books changed everything and snippets would be recombined in to new books (which is certainly not possible using Google Book Search); John Updike’s riposte at BEA overreacted to the threat (which was Kelly’s overreation). Nice to see a balanced and rational middle ground.